is son's love by tales of the wood, but he
did not.

For the most part, Harold ignored his father's occasional moments of
tenderness, and spent the larger part of his time with his sister or at
the Burns' farm.

Mr. and Mrs. Burns saw all that was manly and good in the boy, and they
stoutly defended him on all occasions.

"The boy is put upon," Mrs. Burns always argued. "A quieter, more
peaceabler boy I never knew, except my own Jack. They're good, helpful
boys, both of 'em, and I don't care what anybody says."

Jack, being slower of thought and limb, worshiped his chum, whose
alertness and resource humbled him, though he was much the better
scholar in all routine work. He read more than Harold, but Harold seized
upon the facts and transmitted them instantly into something vivid and
dramatic. He assumed all leadership in the hunting, and upon Jack fell
all the drudgery. He always did the reading, also, while Harold listened
and dreamed with eyes that seemed to look across miles of peaks. His was
the eagle's heart; wild reaches allured him. Minute beauties of garden
or flower were not for him. The groves along the river had long since
lost their charm because he knew their limits--they no longer appealed
to his imagination.

A hundred times he said: "Come, let's go West and kill buffalo.
To-morrow we will see the snow on Pike's Peak." The wild country was so
near, its pressure day by day molded his mind. He had no care or thought
of cities or the East. He dreamed of the plains and horses and herds of
buffalo and troops of Indians filing down the distant slopes. Every poem
of the range, every word which carried flavor of the wild country, every
picture of a hunter remained in his mind.

The feel of a gun in his hands gave him the keenest delight, and to
stalk geese in a pond or crows in the cornfield enabled him to imagine
the joy of hunting the bear and the buffalo. He had the hunter's
patience, and was capable of creeping on his knees in the mud for hours
in the attempt to kill a duck. He could imitate almost all the birds and
animals he knew. His whistle would call the mother grouse to him. He
could stop the whooping of cranes in their steady flight, and his
honking deceived the wary geese. When complimented for his skill in
hunting he scornfully said:

"Oh, that's nothing. Anyone can kill small game; but buffaloes and
grizzlies--they are the boys."

During the winter of his sixteenth year a brother of Mr. Bu